Filner saga shocker: Walt Ekard (?) to the rescue

The sexual-harassment scandal that has made San Diego Mayor Bob Filner a national punch line and triggered calls for his resignation has a very odd dimension: It’s come as little surprise. Filner’s behavior has always been extreme for a politician as prominent — and successful — as the former congressman, city councilman and school board member. Insiders have talked about the possibility of a mayoral implosion since the day Filner was elected in November.

But just a few days into the fast-moving scandal, we got a genuine surprise — and a huge one.

The man Filner is counting on to rescue him is Walt Ekard?

In giving Ekard vast oversight authority as the city’s acting chief operating officer, the mayor is counting on the well-regarded former San Diego County chief administrative officer to bring stability and thoughtful management to a City Hall that was chaotic and disorganized even before the sex-harassment scandal hit.

If it goes as well as hoped, Ekard’s ascension will mean Filner can focus on dealing with his scandal instead of also having to deal with his administration’s many other controversies.

And perhaps even more than Filner expected, Ekard’s hiring has won over the business community — to the point where it seems tepid or opposed to any move to force the mayor out. The CEO of the Downtown San Diego Partnership — Kris Michelle, once Mayor Jerry Sanders’ chief of staff — urged her board members to rally behind Ekard.

Which gets to the unlikeliness of Ekard coming to Filner’s rescue. It’s not just Filner, a determined micromanager, ceding power to another micromanager — an unelected one. It’s also that as CAO for San Diego County, Ekard wasn’t just a technocrat implementing the ideas of a Republican Board of Supervisors. He was widely seen as a doctrinaire conservative whose vision of government is the opposite of Filner’s — a man whom Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, said was “the most progressive big-city mayor in America,” at least until the latest scandal broke.

By contrast, “Walt grew up in East County living and breathing Republican politics,” one longtime acquaintance says. As a public official, Ekard’s ideology was most on display when it came to his disinterest in improving San Diego County’s famously awful record in helping poor families and individuals obtain federally funded food stamps. For years, activists said the county was the worst of any major county in the U.S. in the percentage of eligible people who were enrolled for the benefits — less than 30 percent, much less than half the national average.

This was not something that just happened. Counties that want to help the needy know how to do so: by extending hours to take applications; providing outreach to encourage eligible families to sign up; automatically prescreening applicants for other benefits for their food-stamp eligibility; etc.

San Diego County wouldn’t take these basic steps. The official rationale was concern about food-stamp fraud.

Activists responded by documenting that nearly all food-stamp recipients were below the federal poverty level, disabled people or seniors; that in California, two-thirds of the recipients were children; and that by all measures, food-stamp fraud was far less prevalent than it used to be.

Finally, in 2009, with the local economy in a shambles and “food insecurity” a way of life for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans, the county was shamed into action and took several steps to ease access to food aid.

But county officials’ actual follow-through was telling. A 2012 U-T Watchdog story detailed how indifferent the county remained to people seeking help in receiving food stamps and other benefits. Because the county didn’t provide enough resources, more than 350,000 phone calls a month — about five out of every six calls — were going unanswered.

A well-regarded manager could have easily fixed these issues. Instead, during the most prolonged economic downturn since the Depression, helping poor people deal with hardship wasn’t a priority for San Diego County’s top bureaucrat.

And now Bob Filner — Freedom Rider, founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and crusader for making more poor kids eligible for free school meals — has handed him the reins at City Hall.

Filner has to believe he is empowering Ekard the capable executive — someone who can help his administration stay on the straight and narrow in dealing with developers, permit seekers and other governments — not Ekard the conservative ideologue, someone whose history suggests he believes the critique that welfare is harmful because it promotes dependency.

Yet there’s no escaping the oddity of the arrangement at the highest reaches of City Hall. To save his mayorship, pure 1960s liberal Bob Filner has turned to someone who probably snorts when he hears the term “social justice.”